Filmmaker Zach Braff can talk OCD, PD, ADs. That's
obsessive-compulsive disorder and panic disorder, both of which are
anxiety disorders. It's understandable, given his background.

Braff's mother and stepfather are psychologists, his stepmother
is a therapist and his lawyer father helps his wife with couples
counselling. Braff also suffers from anxiety disorders.

"My anxiety revs more than the average person's, like an engine
that's revving too high," Braff says. He remembers being diagnosed
with OCD when he was 10.

"At those times in my life when I'm really experiencing it, it's
like your needle's always in red. I've described it to someone
who's never experienced it [as] like when you've been in a car
accident and your heart is racing."

His anxieties and obsessions have sent Braff into the occasional
tailspin, but they've also spurred his talent into action. The
debut feature film from the sweet, smart, nervy 29-year-old
screened at Sundance this year and was grabbed by Miramax and Fox
Searchlight Pictures.

Garden State is an acerbic comedy about drifting
26-year-old actor Andrew Largeman (Braff), who goes home to New
Jersey after his mother dies. There he meets a girl. Not just any
girl. An impossibly vivacious, impudent, animal-loving,
compulsive-liar girl (Natalie Portman).

Braff is emphatically not Largeman, but he drew deeply from his
own experience to write, direct and act in Garden State.

For example, Largeman is an actor, and so is Braff. Remember
television comedy Scrubs? Braff was John "JD" Dorian, the
endearingly rumpled doctor who tripped the maternal instincts of
female viewers everywhere.

Braff has been medicated at times for anxiety, but he has never
been prescribed drugs for psychotic illnesses, like Largeman. He
has also variously been elated and troubled, like Largeman.

"I was pretty unhappy in the public school system," Braff
says.

"I was only happy away in the theatre camp, in this utopia,
where for six weeks out of the year it was cool to be a
performer.

No one brought a mitt, no one brought a basketball. No one gave
a f--- about sports."

At school, he became the popular kid by reaching for a joke,
"otherwise I wouldn't have had any friends".

Braff studied film at Northwestern University in Chicago before
starting an acting career. He played in Macbeth at New
York's Public Theatre alongside Alec Baldwin and later moved to Los
Angeles, where he worked as a waiter in a French-Vietnamese
restaurant. (Like Largeman in Garden State, Braff says the
exchange in the restaurant happened to him, verbatim.)

"Getting sad that someone's got to clean that coffee cup and how
much their life must suck because they're working in a hotel in the
middle of Sydney while I'm in the suite, and they probably have to
struggle to get that coffee cup clean and they've probably got lots
of kids.

"That's what my mind would do ... obsess about a topic that had
nothing to do with my life at the moment, and would unravel and
unspool, obsessing about that topic."

Garden State is a love story, but it's also about the lag
between leaving one's family and starting one's own family, those
extra years when adolescence stretches and governments despair
about the decreasing birthrate. It's supposed to be a time in which
to find oneself, but Garden State seems to be as much about
losing oneself. Braff hopes it is possible to discover yourself. At
the cusp of 30, he says he's honing it down.

"I know that, as shitty a city as Los Angeles may be, I enjoy
having a house and a dog and some land, I know I love living near a
city," Braff says.

"I know what kind of friend I like. I know what kind of woman I
like. Hopefully, at some point, whether it's 29 or 39, you go,
right, I'm enjoying myself, I know who I am."